Uploading by the Moravec Procedure

Hans Moravec proposed a different procedure. A robot surgeon is equipped with a manipulator which branches into ever-finer branches, until at the ends, he has billions of nanometer-scale sensitive fingers. The patient sits comfortably (though presumably with his head locked in place) and awake, while the surgeon puts its manipulator in the patient's head. The tiny fingers on the manipulator start peeling away cells, exposing the brain, but closing blood vessels and such so that it doesn't get too messy. With electrical and chemical sensors on the fingertips, it monitors the activity of all the exposed brain cells. When the robot's computer has figured out what they're all doing, it configures a simulation to reproduce their activity. It then removes those cells, and (through the magic nanofingers again) connects the remaining brain tissue to the simulation. Layer by layer, it proceeds in this manner until the patient's head is empty and it's all simulation.